Press release

We were dogs out there today: Australia captain

Australia coach Jon Uriarte: First of all, I want to congratulate my team. This team has made an amazing effort in the last few years, but specifically in the last 50 days. We started to work at the end of the professional season and most of the players didn’t come back after the regular season but joined the team in Italy. We have been preparing and training and having matches in different countries – Bulgaria, Italy, Poland, Holland, Italy again – and it’s been an amazing effort. And it’s not just been training and working hard; we’ve been trying to build up the personality and creating energy day by day. During the tournament, they were the protaganists of this and for this reason, I want to congratulate them. Today, we wanted to disrupt China’s offense and each rotation had specific targets to try and create problems for their offence. We still need to be more fluent and consistent in reception attack; they did a good job today but it hasn’t been like that every day. We have a lot of room to improve in defence. Our block is quite good but not efficient enough, especially if we want to make the next step and challenge the top teams in the world.

Australia captain Igor Yudin: First of all, I want to congratulate all the staff and members of the team because the job they did this week was something special. I can’t put into words how much is done behind closed doors. Today, as I said yesterday, was a do-or-die game again, the final show and it was up to us to perform. We were the actors and it’s an amazing feeling to come on the last day and dominate a team like that. It’s an unbelievable experience and all of us are really happy to be part of that. For these games, you have to be a lion or a dog and we did that today. We didn’t want to go out there and have people say ‘we could have…’ or ‘we should have…’ We wanted people to see dogs on court and today we did that perfectly. I can’t remember having the same focus and aggression since I joined the team. It’s great that we made this step on such a huge stage and at such a huge moment.

China coach Zhou Jianan: Congratulations to the Australia team not only for today’s win but also for winning a ticket to the Olympics. They played really well today. As for us, I was not satisfied with our performance. They put us under pressure, but the biggest factor was the fact that we lost ourselves. Our will to win was not good enough.

China captain Cui Jianjun: Today, the Australians played great and they put a lot of pressure on us with their serves. That disrupted the flow of our attack. We were hoping to set up rallies against the Australians but we just didn’t have the chance to do that today, so that was disappointing. As a team we played with full power and energy in this game, so I think we can move forward from here.